The Four Levels of Learning

While this month's topic is not directly related to adult learning theory, it is important to understand in terms of designing learning for adults.

Learning progresses "up a ladder" of difficulty from knowledge -which is the easiest way to design and transmit learning - to changed behavior on the job, which is the hardest to achieve through a learning process.

Knowledge is firmly rooted in education.  It involves reading, lectures, and rote memorization.  It is helpful for providing baseline information, such as facts and rules, and is easy to design because it is simply a collection of information. A learner often can partake of knowledge without any professional intervention.

Psychomotor skills are a bit more complex because they involve teaching someone to physically manipulate something such as a cash register or a fork lift.  This type of instruction requires hands-on practice and a skilled instructor to demonstrate or coach appropriate behavior.  This type of training takes longer to design because it includes both information and skill, and it takes longer to teach because an instructor is often required, and practice time should be included.

Proceeding up the ladder of difficulty, critical thinking skills are significantly harder to teach because they require teaching someone to think in a different way. For instance, teaching a loan officer how to determine if someone is eligible for a loan, includes both facts and rules (knowledge) - and applying those to some type of standard -in order to make a decision.  Often, when teaching critical thinking, numerous scenarios must being practiced in order to have confidence that the learner will make the right decision no matter the variable stimuli.

Teaching critical thinking - within itself, can have many degrees of difficulty; from "easy" decision making  - such as whether or not to grant a loan, to life or death decision making such as performing surgery.  This type of learning process requires multiple exposures to information and situations (in other words, it takes longer to teach thinking skills) and is difficult to design in order to ensure that the trainee changes their thinking process permanently.

Finally, ultimately, the goal of training in the workplace is to get people to change their behavior on the job.  This requires actually leaving the training and helping people to transition their new knowledge and skills to their on-the-job responsibilities. That can take a few days to a few months - especially if you're organization intends to do a level three evaluation in order to determine if changed behavior actually has occurred.

Before designing any training program, assess what your desired outcome is (from the four categories above) and invest the appropriate amount of time necessary for both the design and the successful completion of the training.